Through A Glass Darkly

How glass plate tech­nol­ogy met high Tech

By Mark R. Moore

A fine lady in a hat out for a drive.

His­tory in Danville is more than smelly, mildewed books full of dates and records of live birth and dead molder­ing bones. Most peo­ple in the United States live in sleek, shiny, mod­ern con­nected metrop­o­lises where the pejo­ra­tive phrase “What have you done for me lately?” sym­bol­izes both the imme­di­ate lack of car­ing and super­fi­cial con­nec­tions as opposed to what we have here in Danville. It’s what I would call “wear­able his­tory” here. Your best friend might be related to the street you live on (was be a Brain­erd, it might be Green­bank Hol­low, the res­i­dence you live in might have been known for a hun­dred years as Dr. Smith’s House or, pos­si­bly, the Pet­tengill farm. The hill you can see might be Roy Moun­tain and you find there’s an eigh­teen year old Roy on Face­book. Strangest of all, that per­son, by and large, can, if asked, quickly trace their lin­eage directly back to why that house, hill or road was named for a per­son in their fam­ily, not because the fact was drilled into them at school, but because they have a ret­i­cent North­east King­dom nob­less oblige (broadly defined-deferring to a per­son because of their family’s past his­tory past)and sim­ply grew up with a story in their past and is left for you, the present, to dis­cover how the past appel­la­tion became attached to the house or hol­low. Recently, I was pre­sented with a group of dif­fer­ent sized, dark, appar­ently smoky glass pho­to­graphic neg­a­tives that had been in encased a shoe­box in a cel­lar for nearly hun­dred years before they saw the light of day and asked to dis­cover what rela­tion, if any they have to Danville.

The box of glass neg­a­tives was brought to me by His­tor­i­cal Har­riet. Har­riet is always going through our store of arti­facts and likes to sur­prise me with her lat­est dis­cov­ery and see what I will do with it. Before want­ing to delve into the box and see how His­tor­i­cal Har­riet would adapt avail­able mod­ern tech­nol­ogy to solve to solve the prob­lem of get­ting a pic­ture from an old, dark chem­i­cally coated neg­a­tive I did some research on the his­tory of glass plates. Shortly after Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Tal­bot pio­neered the daguerreo­type in 1839 which were printed on silver-plated cop­per or brass. Fred­er­ick Scott Archer, an Eng­lish sculp­tor, expanded their dis­cov­er­ies the dis­cov­er­ies of Daguerre and Tal­bot and came out with the wet glass plate know as the wet col­lo­dion neg­a­tive. Because it was coated glass and not paper the wet glass neg­a­tives cre­ated a sharper, more detailed neg­a­tive and could pro­duce more than one print from a neg­a­tive but this had to be done within five minutes.

The prob­lem with wet plates was that the coat­ing, col­lo­dion, was made by dis­solv­ing cel­lu­lose nitrate (gun cot­ton) in ether, alco­hol and potas­sium iodide which flowed onto the glass plate. The plate was then plunged into a bath of sil­ver nitrate which turned the col­lo­dion on the glass plate into a photo-sensitive sil­ver iodide. The pic­ture had to then be quickly made. The dan­ger was that, in com­bin­ing the chem­i­cals in mak­ing the coat­ing for the plates, the cam­era­man could become the pho­to­graphic equiv­a­lent of Alice in Wonderland’s addled Mad Hat­ter by breath­ing in the com­bi­na­tion of acrid odors sim­i­lar to hat­ters form­ing hats using mer­cury to shape the felt. Clearly, it was a job for pro­fes­sion­als like Matthew Brady who spent the time prepar­ing the plates and gave us some of the most endur­ing images of the Civil War.

In 1873 Dr. Richard Mad­dox opened the door to mod­ern per­sonal ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phy by invent­ing the dry plate glass neg­a­tive. Using a light-sensitive gelatin emul­sion to coat the glass plates the messy, dan­ger­ous process of wet glass prepa­ra­tion was elim­i­nated and the plates could now be stored for months and used by ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phers. The cam­eras absorbed light very quickly so it was only nec­es­sary to expose it to light for a few sec­onds to make a pic­ture and portable dark­rooms no longer had to be hauled around to develop the wet plates before their emul­sion dried. The dry glass plates came became user-friendly by 1880, the plates were sold by man­u­fac­tur­ers, pre-packaged, and the user just had to expose one to light and develop it, to edges of the glass plate were smooth, size was reg­u­lar, and the sil­ver nitrate was more evenly dis­trib­uted. Ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phy thus exploded across the coun­try and the dry glass plates were used until they were fully replaced by George East­man and his Kodak cam­era and cel­lu­lose film by 1920.

But the turn of the cen­tury in Danville was no “snap­shot” era by any means. A cam­era of wood and brass with the dry plates, though smaller than the wet glass had be hauled around by the pho­tog­ra­pher and the sub­jects still had to remain sta­tion­ary for their pic­tures to be taken. The blacken glass remained mute in the shoe box but His­tor­i­cal Har­riet was now ready to per­form her high-tech magic. She lifted the of top of the Hewlett-Packard Office­jet Pro L7600 All-In-One, cleaned it off with Glass Clean and a soft cloth and pre­pared the first neg­a­tive, emul­sion side down.

“Wait a minute,” I ner­vously said, “Won’t you just get a copy of a negative?”

“Sure, if you do it that way” said Har­riet and smiled. “But we’ll reverse the black and white and scan it in the computer.”

“Oh” I said. Deflated.

And that’s what we did. Only once, how­ever, to keep the neg­a­tive from fad­ing. Har­riet waved her sorcerer’s wand and scanned each photo was scanned into the com­puter and sent them went to the Picasa Pro­gram (we don’t have Pho­to­Shop or other sophis­ti­cated soft­ware at the His­tor­i­cal Society)which gave us a vivid, var­ied pic­ture of life in Danville at the turn of the cen­tury. A man stand­ing in a suit in his tall corn­field, ladies with big, new rib­bons on their hats, ladies in car­riages with new coats, loads of hay har­vested and ready to bale, a young boy grin­ning with pride over his young cat­tle and most inter­est­ing among the res­i­dents is the fam­ily who proudly rotated fur­ni­ture in their par­lor so they could take sev­eral dif­fer­ent pic­tures. So, how do we know it was the turn of the cen­tury? A lit­tle more high tech magic. Picasa has a enlarge­ment but­ton that , at your (or, this case, Harriet’s) com­mand moves over a scanned pic­ture and will focus on dif­fer­ent parts of it. We noticed a cal­en­dar and the wall and zoomed in. It said Novem­ber 3rd and showed it was a Sun­day but no year date. Not to be out-teched I grabbed an old diary and found Novem­ber 3rd was a Sun­day in 1903. Har­riet observed that the date could be in a range of approx­i­mately seven years. In another pho­to­graph of the same room, again using the zoom we found the same cal­en­dar with year 1903.

The build­ings came to life in stun­ningly detailed black and white. The old Methodist church with bricks so clear they could have just been laid next to the proud Cale­don­ian National Bank. A ele­vated pic­ture of the Eagle Hotel, the Con­gre­ga­tional Church taken from upper sto­ries of the Elm House. All of the dry plates from which the scans were taken are now stored upright in acid –free, fold­ing boxes of a medium weight buffered board and then placed in another acid-free box or map cab­i­net. So do not despair if you find or know of an old card­board box in a cel­lar, garage, closet or trunk with seem­ingly dis­col­ored glass; plates too dark for you to dis­tin­guish any­one or any­thing. Reach out to it and bring them to life. Touch them. It may be your link to your his­tory in Danville.

A photo of the Green taken from the Elm House, pre-1889. The build­ings burned in the big fire.

5 Responses to Through A Glass Darkly

Hello,
I just read your story on the devel­op­ment of glass plates by scan­ning them into your com­puter. I also have glass plates which I believe have his­tor­i­cal impor­tance (for North Dakota) and won­dered if I could con­nect with Har­riet for more “how to” infor­ma­tion and direc­tions. I under­stand that if the light source is too intense it may break the plate and want to make sure that’s avoided. Thanks for your help.

Hmm it looks like your blog ate my first com­ment (it was super long) so I
guess I’ll just sum it up what I wrote and say, I’m thor­oughly enjoy­ing your blog.
I as well am an aspir­ing blog writer but I’m still new to the whole thing.
Do you have any sug­ges­tions for begin­ner blog writ­ers?
I’d def­i­nitely appre­ci­ate it.